chapter 1

As usual was the day, the buses coming along and the students rushing into their classes. Above looked Anirudh, towards the pristine blue sky. It has just rained and the clouds just cleared away. Everything looked brighter than usual. He just smiled at the sky and walked into the same old place. He loved the school, he loved his friends and all those who he hated belonged to the exclusive south-west wing of the school. The south-west wing was the nightmare of almost every student, expect those who frequented there trying to impress upon the block with their ‘intelligence’.

Well, the south-west wing had the Administrative offices, the secretaries, the Staff room and the Principals Office. Most of the students tried much to avoid the place, except for the students of VIII-B. They were special. They were more frequent than the ‘intelligents’. They were so called the ‘hopeless’ class in the school. And that was the only thing Anirudh was proud of – the guy from VIII-B. Slowly his classmates arrived and the class was starting to have the feel.

There were occasional sounds of ‘dhud’ which came of the back of an unlucky guy, who was mercilessly hit by others. The reason, there were some kind of tacit agreement between a couple of the students that when one gets up he has to say ‘Opts’ to at least one the members of his fraternity and when one sits they have to say ‘Bats’. Forgetting to do so resulted in the ‘dhud’s. A few students even had a backlog of the ‘dhud’s which were kept pending for future use. Anirudh tired that for a week, trying to look cool before the girls. But, unfortunately rolled out his tears when he was hit by five others at the same moment. And that was his last time, he decided not cool is better that a guy with tears.

The class teacher arrived and everyone settled down with the ‘partners’. The class teacher finally had found a way to keep the boys quiet during the classes. Each guy had to sit with a girl and the rows of boys where sandwiched between rows of girls.  Guys, had no other option but to stare at the teacher or stare at some girl in the class. Anirudh, was different he somehow manipulated the weekly rotation mechanism and settled down with a guy. And there started his woes. As usual, the teacher came in read out from the text book for a couple of minutes and then asked a question. The first question of the class is always for Anirudh, and no matter what the answer, he was made to stand outside the class or far away near the wall in the end, obviously with a text book with him.

The classes went on. The class Anirudh awaited the most was the computer science class. In late 90’s he was the proud owner of the best computer in the market- a Pentium II , 200MHz Processor, 32MB RAM and 2GB HDD.  And he had an appetite for computers.  Though he could not be cool, he could write a piece of code faster and better than most of others. Well, the examination answer sheets never did reflect that.